by James Nestor
His friends were impressed when they saw him surface and then sink down again; they thought it was all part of a performance. A few more minutes passed before they realized something was very wrong. They dove down and retrieved Pinon, then dragged him to the beach. His heart had stopped; there were no signs of life. An off-duty paramedic administered CPR. Pinon’s heart started beating but soon stopped again. Fifteen minutes later, an emergency helicopter arrived and airlifted him to a hospital, where he spent eight days in a coma, then three weeks recovering. Pinon suffered permanent brain damage that he says sometimes makes it hard for him to remember things and put words together. He doesn’t want that to happen to me and other freedivers.
For the past three years, on weekends away from his job managing a fish-feed company, Pinon has traveled around Florida teaching beginning freediving and safety courses through Performance Freediving International, a freediving school based in Canada. This weekend in Tampa, PFI has rented out a one-story stucco building that looks like it once housed a fast-food restaurant.
My classmates sit in a hodgepodge of patio chairs arranged around four plastic picnic tables. There’s Ben, a stocky young guy whose gold necklace peeks out of a torn T-shirt; Josh, Ben’s soft-elbowed buddy, who sports rainbow-lens sunglasses; Lauren, a tanned southern belle; and Mohammad, a Qatari student with shaggy black hair and an enormous chrome dress watch. Other than Pinon and me, nobody here is older than twenty-three.
In a few hours, Pinon will teach us how to hold our breath underwater for at least one and a half minutes in a swimming pool right outside the classroom. Tomorrow, we’ll travel north to a freshwater swimming hole and learn how to hold our breath while diving as deep as sixty-six feet.
This morning, however, is about safety. Specifically, Pinon will teach us how to stay alive should we ever find ourselves caught in a pink cloud—a hallucination freedivers experience right before they black out.
“The pink cloud is harmless, but you are unconscious,” says the forty-four-year-old Pinon, who was born in Toulouse, France, and still has a strong accent. “If you get to the surface and breathe, you are fine. If you don’t, then . . .” He pauses. “Then it is not good.” Pinon means that we’ll die.
He explains that, while we’re diving tomorrow, he can take us down to any depth we want; he just can’t promise to bring us back up. Each of us is responsible for knowing his or her limits. The underwater breath-hold training today and tomorrow will give us a feel for those limits. Should we fail in our responsibility, exceed our limits, and drift off forever into the pink cloud, the six pages of release forms we’ve each signed will ensure that our loved ones can’t charge Pinon or Performance Freediving International with third-degree murder. Pinon double-checks that he has our forms. Then he clears his throat, strokes his mustache, and starts the lesson.
WHILE MY RESEARCH IN THE OCEAN will soon take me down to 2,500 feet, my personal experience is lagging far behind, at just a dozen feet. After many months of observation, training, and envy, I am still stuck wading and waiting at the surface.
I’ve watched from the deck of a boat as competitive freedivers plummeted three hundred feet and listened to them describe the full power of the Master Switch, but I’ve yet to feel the full course of these amphibious reflexes myself. I’ve visited the ama, hoping to receive some ancient, secret freediving advice, only to be mocked for my ignorance. I’ve heard Fred Buyle talk for hours about the magnetic connection he feels with sharks, but I still haven’t seen a shark in the ocean, much less swum with them. I’ve spent weeks with Fabrice Schnöller and heard him describe the transcendent feeling of communing with dolphins and whales, but I haven’t seen these animals either.
What’s kept me back is one simple fact: I can’t freedive. This ability may be open to everyone, but the price of admission is high: extreme ear pain, claustrophobia, and uncontrollable convulsions. Now, however, Schnöller has offered to let me join him in a dive with sperm whales, an opportunity I can’t pass up, and one that requires me to go deep.
Performance Freediving International, considered the best school of its kind in the world, has trained six freediving world-record holders and more than six thousand recreational divers, including Woody Harrelson and Tiger Woods. The entry-level course, called Freediver, teaches students basic safety, depth, and breath-hold techniques. Though I practiced some of these with Hanli Prinsloo in Greece, it’s best to just start fresh.
Inside our classroom, Pinon walks over to a laptop and pulls up a video. PFI emphasizes how dangerous freediving is and trains you, right from the start, to deal with potentially deadly situations. He starts with a highlight reel of accidents—the underwater equivalent of those Red Asphalt shockumentaries shown in driver’s ed.
“This is called a samba,” Pinon says. “It’s like a dance.” Blazing rock music pours from the speakers, followed by clips of divers in the throes of seizures. This pre-blackout state occurs at the surface, when a diver’s brain is so deprived of oxygen that it begins sending random electrical signals to the muscles.
“Some people look drunk, some look happy, some very sad,” says Pinon. “You see their faces”—he points to the blissed-out face of one diver on the screen—“and they look like they are emotional, in a wonderful dream.” Sambas are harmless, Pinon says, as long as divers don’t start inhaling water or black out.
After resurfacing, a diver might breathe, start talking, and appear totally normal. But moments later, while air is traveling past the lips, down the trachea, and into the lungs and bloodstream—a process that can take several seconds—he can suddenly lapse into a samba. Should we ever encounter a freediver in a samba state, we must approach gently and hold his mouth above the surface for thirty seconds. Pinon says this is one of many reasons why freedivers should never dive alone, and why we must always watch our diving partners for a full half minute or longer after they surface. He underscores this point repeatedly.
The next video shows divers who have passed the samba stage and lost consciousness. While holding your breath, “you can black out anywhere,” Pinon says. “In a deep ocean, in a shallow lake, in a bathtub—anywhere.” He says that 90 percent of sambas and blackouts happen at the surface; another 9 percent happen within about fifteen feet of it, what freedivers refer to as the danger zone, the area in the water where the greatest shift in pressure occurs. Freedivers very rarely black out on the seafloor. They black out at the surface, then sink back down and drown, like he did.
The first step in saving a blacked-out diver is yelling “Breathe!” in his ears and calling his name. In the blacked-out state, vision and physical sensation disappear, but hearing remains, and it’s often heightened. Yelling, Pinon says, activates parts of the brain that have not yet shut down. This jolt can override the body’s reflex to close the throat so fresh air can enter the lungs.
If yelling doesn’t work, we have to remove the diver’s mask, tap his face, and start blowing on his eyes. The technique frequently revives blacked-out freedivers; often, they’ll come to and begin gasping for air.
Now, if tapping, yelling, and blowing all fail to wake the diver, Pinon says, “things get more serious.” We need to open the throat and force air into the lungs.
One way the body prevents drowning is by closing the larynx when it comes in contact with water. We’re all born with this reflex. When a newborn is put in water, his larynx automatically closes; the baby will open his eyes and instinctively begin swimming underwater.
During blackout, the closed larynx will keep water out of the lungs (a good thing), but it will also keep fresh air out of the lungs (bad). Many drownings in water are known as dry drownings, meaning they result from the larynx closing, not from water getting into the lungs.
Pinon shows us how to open a diver’s mouth with our fingers and breathe two quick puffs. The first opens the larynx; the second delivers air into the lungs and stimulates the body to begin breathing again. In almost all cases, Pinon assures us, this will bring
a blacked-out diver back to consciousness.
While such rescues can be frightening and stressful, actually having a blackout is anything but. “All the pain just goes away,” says Pinon, smiling.
It starts with visual disorientation and light hallucinations, then the fingers, toes, hands, and feet start to tingle. You lose muscle control. These symptoms progress until you enter a state of spacy euphoria accompanied by wildly colorful dreams, the aforementioned pink cloud. Blacked-out divers have reported out-of-body experiences: One competitive diver in Greece told me he saw into the future. (What exactly he saw, he wouldn’t say.)
However mind-expanding blackouts can be, it’s obviously best to avoid them. Extended blackouts are occasionally fatal, and when they’re not, they can cause brain damage, paralysis, cardiac arrest, and strokes.
Every second you hold your breath, oxygen begins to drop. If the oxygen in the brain drops below a certain level, you black out. A person can stay in this blacked-out state safely for about two minutes until brain oxygen gets so low that you enter what’s called an anoxic state. Anoxia will trigger the body to initiate a last-ditch effort to breathe, called a terminal gasp. If there is no oxygen available at this time (for instance, if you’re underwater), brain damage begins to occur and you’ll eventually die.
The key to avoiding a blackout, and the resulting brain damage, is getting to the surface as soon as you start feeling spacy, lose muscle control, or experience hallucinations—a hard thing to do if you’ve miscalculated your dive ability and your muscles start convulsing at two hundred feet down. “This is another reason to always dive within your limits,” Pinon says emphatically.
He dismisses the class for lunch, advising us to eat light, preferably something vegan and caffeine-free. Dairy, he says, can plug the sinuses and make it hard to equalize at depth. Caffeine will raise the heart rate and speed up metabolism, causing the body to suck up more oxygen and shortening dive times. After lunch, we’ll all get in the pool and start testing our limits.
OF ALL THE DISCIPLINES IN freediving, static apnea, a timed breath-hold that usually takes place in a pool, is the strangest. It’s boring to watch, painful to do, and tedious to train for. And yet there is no other activity that will better prepare a freediver to handle the mental and physical stresses of deep diving.
In 2001, the world record for static apnea, held by a Czech named Martin Štěpánek, was just over eight minutes. In 2009, Stéphane Mifsud, a French diver, increased the record by 27 percent, to eleven minutes and thirty-nine seconds.* As of 2013, two divers have held their breath for more than ten minutes: Mifsud and Tom Siestas, of Germany. If static divers continue at their current rate, they’ll break the fifteen-minute mark mentioned in historical accounts of pearl and sponge divers by around 2017.
Static apnea has its own set of fringe disciplines: breath-holds in shark tanks, under ice, in plastic bubbles. An increasingly popular variation is static with pure oxygen, which follows the same rules as regular static apnea except that divers can huff pure oxygen a half an hour before going under. Doing this supersaturates the blood with oxygen, allowing the brain and other organs to function significantly longer than they could if the diver had inhaled natural air (which contains only about 20 percent oxygen). David Blaine, the American magician and stuntman, trained with PFI and in 2008 broke the static-apnea-with-oxygen record with a breath-hold of seventeen minutes and four seconds that he performed live on Oprah. Five months later, Siestas broke Blaine’s record, and Siestas now holds the all-time record: an astounding time of twenty-two minutes and twenty-two seconds.
We won’t try anything like that in our course. To be officially certified as a freediver, each of us needs to do a static breath-hold of at least one minute and thirty seconds. Physically, it’s not much—any human in decent health is capable of hitting that mark. But mentally, it can be a challenge. There is nothing intuitive or natural about keeping your face underwater until your brain begins hallucinating and your muscles convulse. But this, I am told, is all part of going deep.
BY 1:30 P.M., WE’VE SLIPPED on wetsuits and regrouped in the shallow end of the pool. PFI’s intermediate class, which is being held in an adjacent room, enters the pool too. One of two male intermediate instructors stands at the side of the deep end with his shirt off. He has tattoos of fish gills running up both sides of his rib cage.
Mohammad, the quiet Qatari with the chrome watch who was seated next to me in class, agrees to act as my monitor. He’ll periodically check that I’m still conscious and will keep my body from drifting.
The sensation of spinning is common during long breath-holds, because your body loses awareness of its own boundaries. This is a hallucination, says Pinon, but nothing to worry about. While placing a hand on the back does not keep static divers from accidentally losing consciousness, it reassures them in their hallucinatory state that they aren’t suddenly sinking, floating off, or flying away.
Pinon gives a one-minute warning. I slip my mask on and start breathing a little deeper. Pinon and Mohammad chant the pre-dive breathing pattern aloud: “Inhale one, hold two, exhale two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight-nine-ten, hold two.” On Pinon’s command, I take four huge breaths and then sink headfirst into the water.
I can do the one-minute hold with no problem. A few minutes later, the two-minute hold is filled with tedious agony. But, strangely, the three-minute hold goes by in a comfortable haze for me, as though I’ve crossed some invisible border. I don’t pass out, and for a few minutes afterward, I feel lightheaded, dizzy, and very high, like I’ve just huffed laughing gas. It’s great.
Feeling this good would ordinarily be damaging in some way, at a minimum killing off a few thousand brain cells. But according to dozens of studies, extended breath-holds are harmless. Neurological damage occurs when the blood in the brain carries too little oxygen or when blood flow stops completely. These conditions occur only after two minutes in a blacked-out state. In other words, as long as you’re conscious or wake up from a blackout within two minutes, there’s a very good chance you’ll suffer no damage from holding your breath. Water extends your time by shunting blood from the extremities into the brain and organs, allowing them to function with minimal oxygen for much longer than they would on land—triggers of the Master Switch.
Under normal conditions, the human body has a blood-oxygen saturation of around 98 to 100 percent (the higher number being the most oxygen that the blood could possibly contain). Physical stress or sickness can decrease oxygen saturation to about 95 percent. Few healthy people will ever go below this, but during dives, expert divers have registered oxygen-saturation levels as low as 50 percent—an extraordinarily low number. Oxygen saturations below 85 percent generally cause an increased heart rate and impaired vision; 65 percent and below greatly impairs basic brain functions; 55 percent results in unconsciousness. But somehow, expert divers have not only remained conscious with oxygen saturations of 50 percent but maintained muscle control and extremely low heart rates, reportedly as low as seven beats per minute.
BACK AT THE POOL, my class is getting ready for the final breath-hold of the day, which will last four minutes, the maximum allowed for this introductory course. During the longer holds, partners have done periodic check-ins by tapping the breath-holders on the shoulder every fifteen seconds. When a diver feels the tap, he has two seconds to extend the forefinger of the submerged left hand, a way of saying, I’m still here, I’m okay. If he doesn’t respond, his partner will give him one more chance and tap again. If the second tap elicits no response, the diver’s partner will lift him from the water, yell at him to breathe, remove his goggles, and blow on his eyes.
The partners begin chanting the warm-up breathing pattern—“Inhale, exhale, hold two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight-nine-ten, hold two, inhale one.” The intermediate class at the deep end of the pool joins in the chant. I’m still quite high from the three-minute attempt and feeling spaced-out as I breathe deeper. The chorus of voices ec
hoing off the concrete walls grows louder, reverberating around the enclosed pool area like incantations in an old church. It’s hypnotizing. The course is beginning to feel like a baptism, each of us trying to be reborn in a watery world.
Then it’s one more breath, and we’re underwater again.
A minute passes, then two. Every fifteen seconds, Mohammad taps my shoulder. I extend a finger, bend it down, extend again. During the second minute, I notice sounds in the pool area that I hadn’t heard before: a gurgle in the drain, a muffled cough, a splash in the deep end. I hear Mohammad counting somewhere over me, feel his hand on the small of my back, then stop feeling much of anything. I imagine myself traveling in a train through the desert. This scene looks very real. One part of me knows that I’m still in a Tampa swimming pool, but another part seems convinced that I’ve boarded a faraway train. Both parts are equally strong, like reflections of each other. As my stomach begins to convulse, I push my mind farther into the train side, to open that door wider.
A conductor announces that we’ll be disembarking in three minutes. He taps me on the left shoulder and I hand him my ticket with the index finger of my left hand. The blue fabric of the seat is soft, like silk. I stroke it with this finger. The conductor taps me on the shoulder again; I reach in my pocket to hand him the ticket, but the ticket is gone. I motion with my finger for him to wait while I look in my bag. I can’t find my bag. The cabin is too dark; the sun is gone. I hear someone nearby splashing water in a sink. The conductor taps me again on the shoulder. I point to the door and ask if I can get off. You can do this, he says. You can do this.